


Fortune

by Ori_Cat



Category: SCP Foundation
Genre: Gen, i'm sorry nadox, revolutions always come 'round again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27393982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ori_Cat/pseuds/Ori_Cat
Summary: I, Nadox, write this testament...Of the telling of the tale of the Deathless Empire.
Relationships: Klavigar Nadox & Grand Karcist Ion, Klavigar Nadox & Klavigar Orok, Klavigar Nadox & Klavigar Saarn
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Fortune

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Indices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indices/gifts).



It is only because of luck you ever learned to read - literally. You should have been kept home, of course, to work the fields and keep the house, but claiming to want company Lakṣmī would lead you along every few days to the court under the almond tree, where she learned lettering and counting and you peered over her shoulder at the tablet, scraping the signs into the dust with your fingernail. _Cow_ and _tree_ and _I want, you say, the lord will._

You should have given up after the syllabary - Kanta did, but you stayed, scrawling out lines of poetry and tabulating numbers. And even when you are no longer a child and you two cannot go out together, she brings you back her tablet covered with your household accounting, for you to scribe up and mark in red mudstone on the smooth-polished wall beside the door. 

Eventually, it becomes another way for your hands to render meat and milk for the table - after Lakṣmī marries, and with your parents aging, you offer yourself up as a scribe-in-clay, reading for people missives they cannot read themselves, writing replies, recording their names on small scraps of bark to be handed to the tax collectors with their scraped-together handfuls of _kúan_. You see more of humanity this way than you ever thought you would: women weeping when a notice of debt arrives that they cannot repay, lingering in your stoop with hands pressed to trembling mouths rather than return to the children they will have to sell. Men taking missives from long-lost cousins, eyes going soft with remembering. Children bringing you shards of discarded clay, clinging to long-irrelevant caravan manifests as artifacts from a glorious and romanticized past.

Until one day, a young woman comes to sit down on the other end of your mat. She hands you a chunk of inscribed clay with her jaw set, and when you take it, her hand falls back to settle just beside the knife hanging from her belt. You would ask, but it is not your place for inquiry or interpretation. It is your place simply to report the words.

You read: “Ishita: I come with Anik and Mahanti and twenty others in two days. Receive us, and have the path hidden.”

It sounds like outlaw speech. You say nothing, but she must catch the understanding in your eyes.

“You understand that if you speak of this within hearing, we will hold you as one of them,” she says. 

You nod. Just like you have had practice in not saying that you have always been sympathetic to the outlaws - think how much easier your family could have eaten, without the taxes coming spring and fall, without the fields dedicated to the slender beans that were cropped and carted and brought back nothing to your village.

But twenty - that is enough of a band to do practically whatever they plan. They could block out the road for the soldiers to travel. They could set the lady’s house to flame, and her household within it. They could ensure that you return to that time your father’s mother’s mother tells you about, before the Daeva had ever set eyes upon you.

“Do you need to give a reply?” you ask, as is normal.

The woman shakes her head. “No need.”

The words are out before you can stop them. “Do you need help?”

She looks at you from the corner of her eye, and unexpectedly smiles.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The rest of the story - well, pass over that, that near-cliché: a door slammed open in the earliest hours of dawn, your hosts cut down as they rise in shock and grope for lamps to see by, clothing to cover themselves. Yourself and your companions, hauled out blinking and barefoot and dragged to a city square by hands harsh as adamant. A scaffold, a knife. Your casting out into the ever-starving maw of the wilderness. 

Which should have been the end, save for your retrieval by a pre-ecdysial prophet, and the continued rising of the sun, red as violence.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“What are you doing?” A head peers over your shoulder, and you shift one hand protectively over your inkwell so that the long hair now falling onto your work surface does not fall into it. 

(Not that it would really matter much - black on black would be unnoticeable. But you imagine a spray of streaks covering the corner of your bark-sheet, concealing your words within their long blades like a dropped axe within a meadow, and something inside you flinches.)

 _“Making a record,”_ you reply with as much curtness as you can muster, hoping that Saarn will take the hint and move herself away.

She does not. “Of what?” Her shoulder brushes yours as she cranes her head further, and you set down your pen as well.

 _“Of what we have done,”_ you answer. _“For when we are free, when we are safe and spared from all distresses, we will have to know how it was done. You know. We cannot understand what we are unless we understand where we have come from.”_

“Can you not just remember that?” Orok asks from your other side. 

_“Tell me what happened the seventh day after the beginning of winter in the year in which you joined the host,”_ you demand, in way of an answer.

Orok begrudgingly crinkles his nose. “Fair enough.”

“So what does this say?” Saarn asks, pointing at the first line crawling down the right margin of your bark-sheet. 

_“The fifteenth day of the third month of the two-and-twentieth year of Tungarayati’s rule,”_ you answer. 

“What about this one? It’s got the same -“ she circles her finger around a grapheme further to the left. 

_“In the third company was assigned Tänhenkopra and Khulina of Colchis -“_

“So you can write anything, just by rearranging the signs,” Saarn says. 

_“Yes.”_ Out of a finite number of elements, language can construct an infinite realm of meaning - just like all the myriads of living things share oneness through weri and yet have so many different forms, behaviours, lives. 

“So could you... could you do my name?” 

So you slide your pen between your fingers, and mark it down in neat Daevite script. And then, reconsidering, you fill in beside that the pictograms of Adi-üm, the crossed spears and libation bowl that are the base tools for the weaving of spells and incantations. She should have a name scribed into her own tongue. 

For the sake of fairness, you also do Orok’s, truncated to two graphemes and followed by the comb-antlered reindeer. 

Saarn traces around the still-wet lines with the tip of a finger. “Do yours,” she says. 

An unexpected resistance takes hold of your heart. You glance over all the other marks, the tale of the past week’s march westward towards Moru-on-the-lake, gateway to the northwest provinces and center of the river trade routes. 

Your name is not a neutral thing - people often used to joke that you had been named to balance Lakṣmī out, lest the spirits be attracted to the goodness in her name like insects to a lamp, to get trapped under the horn and rot her out. But with another child named Misfortune, the family’s luck had been neutralized again. 

_“I already know my name,”_ you say.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


It becomes a habit, soon - the two of them taking up positions on either side of you the instant they see you with a birch-bark, a tablet, or a scroll in your hands. Watching as you mark down the history of yourselves, observing as under your pen they are transfigured into a mythology rather than just a girl and a man trying to make the best of a fate they didn’t think they’d live to see. Sounding out the letters, pointing at things and asking for your clarification even as you pushed their smear-risking hands away; or else scraping marks with their claws into scraps of bark and the undersides of horsehoof mushrooms. 

Today, they have already left into the blue-sun morning, and you are gently waving away falling hemlock needles while you wait for your ink to dry when another set of footsteps comes up from behind you. 

“What,” asks your prophet, “are you doing?” 

You jump. _“Writing,”_ you answer. 

He chuckles at your predictability. “About what?” He leans forward in the place where Saarn was only a few minutes ago, to read the words over your shoulder. 

And then he laughs, that beautiful, bird-like laugh. “Oh, Nadox.” 

_“What?”_ You feel yourself shrink protectively down over the bark. _“If you do not think it is a useful pursuit -“_

“Oh, no,” he says. “Not at all. You know I have read the books too. You know I know how the prayers go.” He folds his arms over you as though you are a lectern, long fingers settling around the sides of your neck. “I only wish you had told me of your presence of mind, in stealing away so great a weapon.” 

“Write us, then,” he says. “I will stop us dying, but you... make us immortal.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Sometimes, you wonder if this is not selfishness - more than once Saarn has to drag you away from the encroaching beweaponed horde, or the multi-ton collapse of a shrine in the final throes of its once-patron. That you can say there are things more important than my survival and believe yourself. 

But you do. It matters, that you can mark down every detail, that someone - decades, centuries, millennia hence - might read these words and know that this is how a god dies. That you were here. That there was some cry the Daeva could not silence and some story they could not erase. You existed, and you fought even if it turns out that you don’t win, and you will make that matter if it takes all the effort you have in store. 

For you are the first rebellion against Daevon that ever reached this stage in development. All others perished early, embryonically, barely digging a single villus into the substrate before they were swooped upon and crushed, the soldiers burning buildings and hanging the survivors out to die under Rokápádaiya’s eye. 

Or at least, this is what is written. What actually was is a very different matter. Perhaps you will retrieve it some day, that vaunted Truth that is The Past before millions of hands overwrote it and millions of tongues overspoke it. In a dark and ill-used storeroom beneath the rampart-wall of some fortress, buried underneath layers and layers of crushing stone, you will draw from a wax-sealed vessel the scroll inscribed with Reality and then you’ll know. Everything will make sense. That more than anything else is what keeps you here, the prospect that in his van you will find answers, and they will not be torn from your hands.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


But the war arrives faster than you expect, leaving you running behind trying to catch up with it, and your hands end up holding spines more often than styli and bone more often than brush. The Western seafarers send their ships, and their armies overland, and under the assault you feel the supporting tendons of the Kalmaktama holdings begin to weaken. 

But you try to believe - it is unfair that you doubt. It would be doubly unfair that you leave, so you remain, lend what little knowledge you have to the battles and try to nerve the arms of those that know more. But as the Westerners take bite after bite out of the flanks of your realms, you know that fortune stayed behind from the very beginning of your chasing after him, on the banks of the Sindhu beneath the almond trees. 

The siege of Arvostoin is broken, and your forces and those of the Mekhanites are very nearly matched. For a long while, you have been distracted, pinned upon the hillside with a few other. Ion and Lovataar are elsewhere - hopefully within the fortress. His strength can emanate as far as that - no need to risk himself on the field. 

But you glance up, and see across the sea of flesh and metal the trees go white and then dissolve into sludge as he seizes their resources for his own and throws a wave of flesh towards a figure armoured in untarnished bronze. They dodge, closing the range and drawing a weapon - both are moving too fast to see what it is from this distance. The Mekhanite strikes, and he is thrown to the ground, casting up a spray of ash. You see him struggle to his knees, and the Mekhanite approaches again. Another blow of the weapon. 

There is no way you could get there rapidly enough to help - time may be a Daevite lie but space is fundamental, and far, far too broad. _Rise,_ you will, uselessly. _Kolan toyatta._

You must observe, at least. This has been your role from the start - to see everything, much more than you could ever tell, and in doing so reveal by thumbwidths and patches the shape of the story written for you, onto G’hōl’s flank, onto the underlying epithelium of existence. To watch. To remember. To behold. _And know this is how a god dies._

But the sunlight glances off the needle of a drawn blade, and your nictating membranes slam shut, and then your eyelids after them and you are falling, blindly, humanly, wings shrinking back to hands to cover your face. You can’t, can’t raise your head, can’t pry them apart. Can’t look. Your eyelashes bend against the hollows of your palms. 

Only one of the two of you ~~can~~ could (please, no) ever bear the unbearable. And it was never you.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


And so you run, any final cry that might have risen behind you lost in the cacophony of the waning battle. Through the mud and scrublands, again into the wilderness, which unrolls itself before you just as welcoming as before. 

Just before the onrushing surge of news you stumble into the nearest Nälkän town - and the next, and the next, days melting into each other in your flight, a series of ever-growing radii as behind you the foundations of the Empire begin to sink under the weight of bronze, collapse underneath limestone. But you are recognizable, and you cannot stop the rest of your people (the remnant, abandoned here in the world to fail and die still trapped in Yaldabaoth’s chains) from asking: _were you there? Did you know when it - did you see?_

Your voice has shrunk still and silent to the bottom of your mind, but you can still speak with your body. So to every question, you shake your head. 

_Were you there? Did you see?_

It is a betrayal worse than a knife in the back, and worse yet in that it has pulled your own self inside-out too - you are no longer person but oxymoron, the All-Seeing willfully blind, and you know that without you they won’t remember. When your tales and deeds cascade down into the future, he will simply... dissolve, at this point, ignominiously, no rites even in the hearts of his people. 

But...the Truth. Whether or not their questions are thoughtless, hushed, pitying. _Did you see?_

_No._


End file.
